President-elect Donald Trump has announced he will nominate Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt is seen as a close ally of the fossil fuel industry. In 2014, The New York Times revealed that Pruitt and other Republican attorneys general had formed what the paper described as an "unprecedented, secretive alliance" with the nation's top energy producers to fight Obama's climate efforts. Senator Bernie Sanders said, "Pruitt's record is not only that of being a climate change denier, but also someone who has worked closely with the fossil fuel industry to make this country more dependent, not less, on fossil fuels." For more, we speak with May Boeve, executive director of 350 Action, and Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch.
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NERMEEN SHAIKH: President-elect Donald Trump has announced he will nominate Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental ...

The Two Scourges of Fossil Fuels: Global Warming and Toxic Pollution
OO Taxing Climate Denial
Via The Paris Climate Accord - Takeaways:
Donald Trump's administration plans to ignore climate change.
If the US fails to participate in the Paris climate accord,
US inaction could boost global temperatures up to nearly a 2 C rise by 2050,
Both through direct pollution,
and discouraging others to act.
Fossil fuels destabilize the planet via climate change,
And toxic air pollution that causes roughly 4,000 deaths daily.
Thus, the US should pay for the damage and deaths its promotion of fossil fuels will cause.
Not Just Preserve But Regrow Our Carbon Storing Forests Source www.huffingtonpost.com
The solution?
Have every participant of the Paris climate accord
Agree to impose a multilateral carbon tax
on the trade (goods and services)
of any country which abandons its agreement.
The tax would be used to promote carbon cutting solutions:
Vastly developing clean, renewable power globally;
Reforestation;
Developing ...

West Virginia sits atop a treasure chest of coal resources.
Coal began to define the state's culture, history, and the economy as early as 1742, when John Peter Salling unearthed the coal in present-day Boone County, West Virginia. Today, all but 4.5% of the state's electricity comes from coal, and arguably there is no greater consequential and polarizing topic today for West Virginians than the debate over what should be done with the state's coal resources.
But there are two things about coal that are undeniable: coal has an impact of human suffering, and coal contributes to climate change.
For me, it took a ground tour of mountaintop removal sites to fully realize the impact of coal in West Virginia, and how its primary extraction method, mountaintop removal, has far-reaching effects. Guided by Dustin White and Vivian Stockman, West Virginia locals and activists with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, we trekked for hours looking at the impacts of mountaintop removal at sites such as Hobet 21 ...

Indian energy giant Adani on Monday achieved a "key milestone" in completing its massive and controversial Carmichael coal mine project in Australia—a project, according to a marine conservation group, "that will super charge climate change and sound the death knell for our Reef."

Today, the Earth got a little hotter, and a little more crowded.
And the chances of Donald Trump's family and fortune surviving climate change are small, dwindling daily and irreversibly.
Saving BUB, Beautiful Unique Biodiversity, as in these monkey face orchids that occur in Peru, is another reason to preserve carbon storing forests. Source www.hideme.io
Forests: the cheapest way to store carbon
OO Morocco Plants Millions Of Trees Along Roads To Fight Climate Change - A government-led tree-planting program is aiming to offset carbon emissions while propagating protected species.
Source mongabay.com
OO Peru Rainforest, the Size of 10 Manhattans, Further Lost To Illegal Gold Mining new aerial surveys show. Although currently declining, it's not likely to end anytime soon, and there are new incursions into primary forests and protected areas.
The world lost out on yet another sizeable chunk of cheap carbon storage.
When we harm forests, we harm ourselves.
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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
@@ Climate Change 101: Why ...

Responsible Americans can’t give up on shrinking the nation’s carbon footprint while a climate denialist and his fellow travelers have their way with the federal government. And while it’s true that market forces will probably help continue to reduce the nation’s carbon footprint, there’s still a lot of work to be done if Trump makes good on his plans to abandon our climate commitments.

I couldn't, post-election, muster a plausibly big enough piece of good news to warrant a Thanksgiving blog -- but then this morning one arrived. In an astonishingly short eight years, as a result of tougher emission rules on power plants and a declining use of coal, concentrations of mercury in Atlantic Bluefin tuna, the sushi sort, dropped by 19 percent. There are similar findings for bluefish, but tuna are much longer lived, so the results are extremely surprising -- concentrations of mercury in even much older tuna fell at the same or faster rate as mercury concentrations in sea water, suggesting that fisheries contamination can be reversed far more quickly than anyone had dreamed.
Bluefin tuna are still not healthy for women of child-bearing age -- and most of the tuna which had led over 10 percent of U.S. women having unhealthy mercury in their blood is not from the Atlantic ocean, which is healing, but from the Pacific, where coal consumption and mercury loading remains unabated.
Mercury ...

I couldn't, post-election, muster a plausibly big enough piece of good news to warrant a Thanksgiving blog - but then this morning one arrived. In an astonishingly short eight years, as a result of tougher emission rules on power plants and a declining use of coal, concentrations of mercury in Atlantic Bluefin tuna, the sushi sort, dropped by 19%. There are similar findings for bluefish, but tuna are much longer lived, so the results are extremely surprising - concentrations of mercury in even much older tuna fell at the same or faster rate as mercury concentrations in sea water, suggesting that fisheries contamination can be reversed far more quickly than anyone had dreamed.
Bluefin tuna are still not healthy for women of child-bearing age - and most of the tuna which had led over 10% of US women having unhealthy mercury in their blood is not from the Atlantic ocean, which is healing, but from the Pacific, where coal consumption and mercury loading remains unabated.
Mercury contamination is a serious ...

OO Air Pollution:
The Next Generation Carries The Burden Of Our Inaction - adults who grew up in less polluted days can cope with pollution. But when a child's lungs are damaged, they are damaged for life.
OO Air Pollution Emerges As A Top Killer Globally says new research, a powerful if silent killer, causing 6.5 million worldwide deaths as well as being the major cause of climate change.
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FIXING CLIMATE CHANGE
@@ A Simple And Smart Way To Fix Climate Change given by Dan Miller in 2014 at a Ted talk suggests a way to profit as we tackle climate change, by finally charging those who sell and use fossil fuels - and distributing the revenues back to all of us.
The strategy is sure to speed transition to clean renewable energy. What's not to like? Check it out!
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TRUMP TRUMPED BY CLIMATE CHANGE
Ggg donald trump family children grandchildren, Source heavy.com, ccr 356
Donald Trump's Children Likely Face Climate Apocalypse in their lifetimes; the likely crash of civilization that follows will crash ...

Bill Hare , Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Niklas Höhne , Wageningen University
After the climate talks in Marrakech, our climate mission remains the same as what was set out in the 2015 Paris Agreeement : to eliminate all carbon dioxide emissions by the middle of this century.
While the long-term focus is on 2050 or 2100, what matters now is the next ten years. If we miss bending the rising emissions curve downward by around 2020, we may well miss the chance to avoid the worst climate damage.
Climate Action Tracker., Author provided
We looked at all the major emitting sectors and the most recent scientific analyses of what can be done - and how fast - to come up with a list of the most important things to do in the next five to ten years to bend the emissions curve downwards.
Here's the good news: for all areas, we show signs that a transition of this magnitude is possible. In many cases, it's already happening.
Phasing out coal
The scientific literature shows that decarbonising the ...

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On a day when U.S. President-elect Donald Trump took to YouTube to announce that one of his first acts as President will be to get rid of regulations on coal and shale gas, the Trudeau government announced its plan to almost completely phase out coal-powered electricity.

Canada plans to phase out most coal-powered electricity plants by 2030, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna announced Monday.
By speeding up the timeline for closing coal-fired plants, which spew more pollution than most other fossil fuels, the country expects to reduce its carbon emissions by 5 megatons, or the equivalent taking of 1.3 million cars off the road. Coal makes up nearly three-quarters of the Canadian electrical industry’s greenhouse gas emissions, and over 8 percent of the country’s total carbon footprint.
“Taking traditional coal power out of our energy mix and replacing it with cleaner technologies will significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, improve the health of Canadians, and benefit generations for years to come,” McKenna said in a statement. “It sends a clear signal to the world that Canada is a great place to invest in clean energy.”
Roughly 80 percent of Canada’s electricity currently comes from zero-emission sources, McKenna said. Under the new regulations, that ...

United Nations—Coal power does more to harm the world's poor than to help them, even before the devastating impacts of climate change are taken into account, according to a recent report published by 12 international development organisations.
Yet despite commitments made under the Paris Climate Change agreement the world could go over the threshold of two degrees warming if just one third of currently planned coal power stations were built, the report found, adding that "if the world exceeds this, the results will be disastrous for the global fight against poverty."
The report "Beyond Coal: Scaling up clean energy to fight poverty," was published by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), CAFOD, Christian Aid and nine other organisations ahead of the 22nd Conference of the Parties to the UN Climate Change Convention in Marrakesh, Morocco, which will conclude on Nov. 18.
Ilmi Granoff, co-author of the report, told IPS that coal "entrenches poverty", contrary to arguments from the coal sector that the ...

Yes, there are reasons to fear an impending environmental disaster : Donald Trump has spent much of his campaign claiming the mantle of climate-change-denier-in-chief , and his vice-presidential running mate isn't much better . Now they are mulling their picks for key Cabinet posts: Interior Secretary Sarah "Drill, baby drill" Palin, if elephant hunter Donald Trump Jr. doesn't get that gig? Energy Secretary Harold Hamm , if the oil and gas mogul decides he is willing to spend the Trump administration outside the private sector? Environmental Protection Administrator Myron Ebell , unless the fringe-hugging climate skeptic dismantles the agency instead?
And yes, Trump often airs unfounded concerns about wind and solar energy related to bird safety and outdated notions of how long it takes for investments in renewable power to pay off. But even if the fossil-fuel fanatics on Team Trump rev up coal mining, gas fracking and oil drilling in national parks , greenlight the Keystone XL pipeline and ...